Photon crystals, interconnection layers of semiconductor components and micromechanical elements can involve three-dimensional structuring of elements in the field of microelectronics. Often, generating three-dimensional structures involves lithographic methods in which semiconductor elements are generated layer by layer using different masks. Such methods can involve applying a photoresist, also called resist, to a carrier and exposing the photoresist using a first lithographic mask. This can be followed by a chemical development step in which the illumination pattern in the photoresist generated during the preceding exposure is translated into a physical structure in the photoresist. Here either exposed regions are removed from the photoresist or, conversely, exposed regions remain while the unexposed regions surrounding the latter are removed from the photoresist. The result is a two-dimensionally structured photoresist layer. A three-dimensional structure can be achieved by appropriately repeating these steps a number of times with different lithography masks.